


paradise i held onto

by soundthebells (kosy)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Developing Relationship, Directly Pre-MAG38, F/M, Fluff, Food is a love language, Morning After, People Who Like Each Other!, allusions to later series events, this is pure fluff except for the unavoidable inherent tragedy of timsasha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:55:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23510428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kosy/pseuds/soundthebells
Summary: Waking up is a sluggish thing, even with his phone alarm vibrating insistently on his nightstand a few feet away. Once Tim’s fully conscious, though, he’s still reluctant to move when he remembers exactly where he is and how he got there.
Relationships: Sasha James/Tim Stoker
Comments: 50
Kudos: 125





	paradise i held onto

**Author's Note:**

> i wasn't planning to write more timsasha, but like, idk, my hand slipped for a few hours straight i guess. it really is just 4k of fluff, folks. hope you all enjoy!

Waking up is a sluggish thing, even with his phone alarm vibrating insistently on his nightstand a few feet away. Once Tim’s fully conscious, though, he’s still reluctant to move when he remembers exactly where he is and how he got there. 

Against his chest, Sasha grumbles something indistinct and blinks her eyes open, squinting up at him balefully. “God, Tim, how early is it?” Strands of hair have fallen loose from yesterday’s utilitarian bun and are drifting in front of her face. It’s distressingly cute, but Tim doubts she’d properly appreciate him bringing it up right now. 

“Seven,” he says, grinning for reasons entirely unrelated to the time. 

She groans and drops her forehead into his sternum. “We don’t have to be at the office ‘til nine, you masochist.” 

“Sorry,” he says, idly moving a hand up to her hair where it curls over the notches of her spine. “Usually I go to the gym in the mornings.” 

“Of course you do,” she mumbles against his skin, and Tim tries to suppress a shiver at the feeling of her lips with a moderate amount of success. She notices, though, and he feels her smile. 

He runs his fingers lightly over the slope of her back. “I mean, there’s no law saying we have to get up now. I could wake you at eight and start making breakfast in the meantime. Or we could stay here for a while. Whatever you want.” 

She makes a low noise of deliberation, tipping her face to the side to look at him, eyelids still drooping blearily. “Mh. Staying sounds nice.” 

“I’m happy either way,” he assures her, and he really, really is. His bedroom curtains are opened slightly to let in a shaft of morning sunlight, and it’s easy to say something is beautiful when it’s lit up in pale gold, but Sasha is more than that. The early sun catches in her dark auburn hair, lights her up firebrand, plays over the lines of her bare shoulders and the dip of her spine. Time spent looking at her like this feels like something stolen—from what, he doesn’t know. At the same time, though, the idea of cooking her breakfast is absurdly nice too. He prides himself on that kind of thing, being a good date. Being a good lay is really only a part of it. It’s the before and after that matters most, the conversation and laughter and indulgent, lazy makeout sessions and breakfast that’s more than a muffin grabbed as an afterthought at the cafe on the way to work. 

“Perfect gentleman, aren’t you,” she grumbles, tilting her head up towards his face, and he grins at how she has to sort of squint her eyes to see him properly without her glasses _(They really are just for reading, Tim!_ Like hell). 

“‘Course I am,” he says, injecting as much mock offense into his tone as he can. 

Sasha snorts, pulling back to prop herself up on her elbow. “I don’t believe it for a second.” 

He laughs, mirroring her body language. “Want me to come over there and prove it?” 

Grinning despite herself, she says, “Even ignoring the fact that we’re _maybe_ three inches apart, I _really_ don’t think that’s how it works—” 

Tim shifts forward and kisses her in one smooth movement, bringing a hand up to her jaw. Despite them being very much naked and tangled up in bedsheets, it’s unhurried and gentle. Her lips are dry and soft, and she sighs a little against his mouth when he breaks the kiss after a long moment. It’s nice, kissing just for the sake of kissing, the only point of it all being closeness. Not quite his norm, but very little about this thing with Sasha is. 

“Well, _I_ think it is,” he says smugly. 

She huffs out a little chuckle, blinking at him slow and lazy. “I don’t know if I’m convinced, honestly.” 

“I think I was very convincing!”

“Yes, but it’s not exactly out of the ordinary for you to be wrong,” Sasha laughs, shoving him over onto his back with a push on his shoulder. “And today’s no different,” she finishes smugly, maneuvering herself to lean over him with a forearm braced over his collarbone. 

“Oooo, _pushy!”_ Tim crows, going easily. “Wouldn’t have expected it from you, Miss James, I _like_ it.” 

She throws him her smuggest cat-got-the-canary grin. “I know you do, Stoker.” Usually he’d be embarrassed about the way his stomach flips at that, but, well. Hard to be embarrassed about much if you’ve got Sasha James pinning you to your bed like this and smiling like _that._

“Got me there,” he says, a little breathier than he’d like, and he relishes the little dart of a smile she gives him before leaning in to kiss him again, deeper this time. He winds a hand into her hair (hopefully he’ll get that bun loose before they’re out of here; he loves the way she looks with hair falling down around her neck). A shudder goes through him as she digs her nails into his shoulder hard just for a moment, probably just because she can. He’s already got marks at the base of his throat and over his clavicle (damn, he’s absolutely going to have to wear a fully-buttoned collared shirt today), so a few more hardly make much difference. Not that he has any objections of personal preference, either. 

They stay that way for a while in that beam of light, his hands in her hair and resting on her waist, her hands shifting from his shoulders to his jaw to his hair. 

She shifts back suddenly but keeps one hand cupping the side of his face. He furrows his brow in silent question, and Sasha smiles, running a thumb over the line of his cheekbone. 

“You know, I thought you were a total dick when I first met you,” she tells him conversationally, and he pulls away. 

“I— _What?”_

She winces, moving a placating hand to his arm. “Sorry, sorry, that came out wrong. I mean—I thought nobody could actually be like that? That—like, funny and kind and sweet. I thought you were putting it on just to get me to have sex with you.” 

Tim actually laughs at that. “Is it arrogant if I say you’re not the first person to tell me that?”

Sasha slides her fingers into his hair and tugs lightly. “Yes, a little bit,” she says, smirking at the way he exhales, sharp and quiet. 

He lets his eyes slide shut. “Well. It wasn’t a very clever strategy to get into your pants.” 

Her nails scratch ever so slightly at his scalp and he shivers a little. “I mean, it clearly worked in the end.” 

Tim snorts, moving his hand to encircle her wrist lightly, just touching the delicate lines of her veins, up and down. “I wasn’t actually—you know, trying to do that until a few months ago.” 

She makes a quiet, considering sound and shifts her weight a little to lean against him more comfortably, all warm skin and gentle touch. “Yeah?” 

“Yeah. I honestly just saw you as a friend until, I don’t know, I didn’t.” 

He can hear the fond smile in her voice when she deadpans, “How romantic.” 

“That’s me: Tim Stoker, king of sweet, sweet romance. You?” 

“Me?” 

“Yeah, you. When did you—?” 

“Oh! I mean, I always…” She heaves out a deeply put-upon sigh. “I always thought you were kind of hot.” 

He chuckles. “Even when you thought I was a—what was it— _total dick?_ You’re forgiven, by the way, for that horrendous lapse in judgment—”

Sasha smacks his shoulder and he cracks his eyes open to grin up at her. “I was right about you being a dick. You just also happen to possess redeeming qualities somewhere in there.” 

“Aw, Sash, that might just about be the sweetest thing anybody’s ever said to me. You know, your pillow talk really is unmatched.” 

“Oh, shut up,” she grumbles, using her handhold on his hair to wrench him up for another kiss, and he doesn’t even care that he has to strain his neck to meet her, angling his whole torso upward just to make sure he doesn’t break contact. She catches his bottom lip with her teeth as she pulls away all too quickly, and he groans softly in the back of his throat. Sasha tosses her head to get the strands of hair out of her eyes and beams back down at him in clear amusement at his distress, palm still resting against his cheek. 

He tips his head a little to kiss the pulse point at her wrist and watches, satisfied, as she flushes and turns her face away to hide it. “What time ‘s it?” 

She sighs, shuffling over to the edge of the bed, and fumbles for his phone on the nightstand to check. “We’ve got time still. I mean, I’ll need to shower and all that, and I don’t know what your routine’s like, but I don’t take too long.” 

“I don’t either, but don’t you need to go back to your place?” 

Sasha scrunches up her nose. “Don’t have time for that now, I live too far away. D’you think anyone’ll notice if I’m wearing the same clothes as yesterday?” 

Tim grimaces. “Uh—Martin probably will, but he’s too nice and cripplingly anxious to say anything about it. Elias, if he comes down, just because I swear he looks out for stuff to make us uncomfortable. Rosie, definitely, if you care about her opinion.” 

“Ugh, with Rosie at the front desk it’ll be around the whole Institute by lunch.” A heavy sigh. “No avoiding it, though, I suppose.” 

“Besides, they’ve really got no way of knowing I had anything to do with it,” he offers. “And Jon won’t notice if that’s what you’re worried about. Even if he does, there’s only a 50/50 chance he puts it together—he really doesn’t assume these kinds of things.” 

She smiles, shakes her head. “That’s fair, I suppose. Plus, I think he’s recording one of the tape statements today, and you know how he gets about those.” 

“Ah, one of the proper spooky ones,” he says dryly. 

Sasha rolls her eyes. “Don’t let him catch you calling them that.” 

“Creepy,” he intones. “Eerie. Sinister. Weeeeeeeeeird.” 

“It really is an odd one, Tim,” she informs him archly. “The guy’s husband got stolen by some sort of haunted pot and nobody can remember his existence except for him.”

“Oh! Right, yeah, I pulled the marriage license for that one. It is actually kind of…” 

“Spooky?” 

“I was going to say depressing, but ha, sure. Spooky too.” He levers himself upright with an audible wince as his bones protest. “Ugh, 'm not as young as I used to be.” 

Sasha laughs. “How old _are_ you, anyway?” 

“Thirty-four,” he mutters. He may not _look_ it, but— 

“Thirty-four like how Jon insists he’s thirty-eight, or…?” 

He scoffs. “God, no. I’m not secretly twenty-five or whatever.” 

Sasha grins, rolling back toward him. “Oh, good. Wouldn’t want to be a cradle robber.” 

“Grave robber, more like,” he says a little ruefully. God, to be twenty-five again. Life had been far less stable back then, just a byproduct of being in his twenties, but he’d had his friends from uni, a solid career at Bloomsbury, a nice flat. Danny. 

He knows he’s going to have to tell her more at some point. He'd left it at _I had a brother; he's dead now. I started working at the Institute right after._ Let her make her own assumptions. But—the urban exploration, the drawing, the _fucking_ Circus. There’s no avoiding it forever. For now, though, it’s nice to pretend he’s just a guy with a shitty flat and a normal job and a normal grief far in the past and his best friend in bed with him and the rising summer sun warming the whole room up. They have time, anyways, for things to get a little more serious; for now, Sasha doesn’t ask him to talk about why why he calls her sometimes late at night just to listen to her speak. She doesn’t have to. She’s just there, quietly and fiercely and without question, even though curiosity is as intrinsic to her as her dark, dark eyes. 

“Well, I'm glad to hear it,” Sasha says, nudging him slightly. There’s no way she missed how he drifted away for a moment, but he’s inordinately grateful to her for not calling him on it. 

Tim clears his throat, mentally shaking himself out of all _that._ “More consistent with our career choice, certainly. I’ll start making breakfast. You know where the shower is, right?” 

“Yeah, ‘course. I _have_ been here before, you know.” 

He rolls his eyes and swings himself out of bed, pulling on the nearest pair of sweatpants he finds on the carpet. “Yeah, yeah. An omelet okay?” 

“Oh, Tim, you don’t have to—” 

“I’m being a _gentleman,_ Sasha!” he insists cheerfully. “What do you want in it?” 

She sighs heavily. “Fine. Whatever you have. Cheese, whichever spices you’ve got that’ll go well, tomatoes—” 

“Ah, I like your style. Better question: what don’t you want?” he grins. 

“Fair. I don’t like ham much.” 

“Good, ‘cause I don’t have any. I’ll get started on all that, then. Tea or coffee?” He has to offer these things. If there’s one thing he’s learned throughout the years, it’s that people _hate_ asking for what they want. Like he won’t just give it to them gladly if he likes them enough. 

Sasha tips her head, weighing the options for a moment. “Coffee, unless you have—”

“Loose-leaf Lady Grey? Splash of milk? Half a sugar if someone else is making it for you, one sugar if you’re making it for yourself and you think nobody’s looking?” He full-on laughs at her expression; he can’t help it. “C’mon, Sash, Martin’s not the only one who can memorize how somebody takes their tea so he can win them over.” 

She snickers. “Oh, you’re looking to Martin for advice on how to romance somebody now?” 

“Don’t be _mean!_ But—no, I’m not. It’s called being considerate.” He pauses, then says, “Did you _really_ think I was _that desperate—”_

Sasha throws a sock from the ground at him (or tries to. It falls to the ground about halfway through the air, it being a sock and all). _“Now_ who’s being mean? Get out of here, Timothy, and make me breakfast.” When he doesn’t go immediately, she twists around and grabs for a pillow, pointing it at him threateningly.

He beats a hasty retreat, scrambling out the bedroom door and into the kitchen. He’s beaming like an idiot, he doesn’t have to catch his reflection in any of his various cutlery to know that, and he’s never cared less. His cheeks hurt from how much he’s smiled over the past twelve hours, he realizes with a start. Tim—honestly can’t remember the last time that’s happened. Which isn’t to say he’s spent the last few years in unvarying, constant misery; he’s had his fair share of good moments with friends or flings or coworkers. But this uncomplicated, birdfluttering of happiness in his chest is shockingly foreign. He waits for the rush of guilt, the feeling that he’s betraying Danny somehow by being happy in his absence. It doesn’t come. He lets out a breathless little laugh, leans his forehead against a cabinet. He’s just _happy._ The joy comes as easy as sleep after a long day. 

After another moment standing there, he shakes himself and gets to work on breakfast. Starts the kettle on the back burner, gets the carton of eggs from the refrigerator, scrounges around in his cupboards for any jars of spices. It’s a little pitiful—an archival assistant’s salary can only buy so many luxuries—but he absolutely _refuses_ to subsist on salt and pepper, so he manages to scavenge some basil, garlic, shallots, and rosemary. Cheese, cream cheese, tomatoes, spinach. A fair spread. He wishes he had more on hand, but he really hadn’t expected to be cooking a proper morning-after breakfast, and _especially_ not for Sasha, whose opinion actually mattered to him in a long-term sense. _I can be good at this,_ he thinks, gazing at the bedroom door from the stove. _I_ will _be good at this. I promise._

“Don’t fuck it up,” he mutters to himself, cracks the eggs into a bowl, and starts whisking them together. The motions are more or less practiced at this point, and he gets into the rhythm easily enough. Mix salt, pepper, and basil into the eggs early. Heat the pan. Melt butter onto it. Pour the egg-salt-pepper-basil mix in— 

Warm arms wrap around his bare waist and he nearly jumps a foot in the air. “Christ, Sasha—” 

A snort muffled into his back. “And you make fun of Martin for being too delicate.” 

“Well, he _is,”_ Tim protests, turning in her arms to face her. She’s just a little shorter than him, which is admittedly startling—at six feet tall, it’s rare to date a woman almost the same height as he is—and she’s raised on tiptoes a little bit to meet his eyes more evenly. 

She smiles at him and doesn’t even bother responding to that weak retort. “Hi,” she says softly. 

“Hi,” Tim echoes. He studies her carefully, the freckles scattered across her nose, those dark eyes whose color he hasn’t quite figured out, the hair such a deep auburn-brown it’s almost black. He’s not trying to memorize the image, necessarily, of Sasha in his kitchen, sleep-ruffled and smiling—he really, sincerely doubts it’ll be his last time seeing it, or at least he hopes it's not—but he wants all of it right now, wants to see it and understand its magnitude. Her lips tug upwards gently, and he wonders if she’s doing the same. Selfishly, he hopes she is. 

“Don’t let the eggs burn,” she tells him, making no move to release him. Not that he’s making any particular effort to get free. 

“I won’t,” he promises, and then he looks her up and down properly. “Are you wearing my shirt?” 

“Yep!” she says. “Unless you have a problem with that?” 

“Can’t imagine it, frankly,” he informs her, fully honestly. It’s one of his larger ones from a charity run he’d done a few years back, coming down to about her midthigh. Really, it’s an upsettingly good look. “Did you come out here specifically for that?” 

Sasha chuckles, finally looking down and away. “Let me have my secrets, Tim.” 

“Well, we all have to,” he concedes. “Are you going to let me cook you breakfast, or…?” 

“Right, I’ll go shower before it’s done,” she says, finally stepping away and letting him go back to the stove. The omelet’ll be a little overcooked on the bottom thanks to that little interlude, but nothing too awful. He adds the fillings and listens idly to the sound of the shower running before the kettle starts screeching and he has to fumble for the little canister of tea leaves and a suitably ridiculous mug (golden retriever with its wagging tail serving as the handle, gifted to him by Martin for his birthday the previous year) while praying the damn eggs don’t burn in his absence. It’s the sort of thing he would scoff at and call sickeningly domestic except for how much it’s becoming clear to him that he desperately, truly wants it. In general. Every day. 

_All right, Tim,_ he remarks to himself wryly. _Don’t get ahead of yourself. It’s one night._ He’s really never been this kind of guy. Had no intention of ever being this kind of guy. Has, in fact, laughed at this kind of guy many times, when he was a bit more of a dick. Best that he remembers that before he gets too cocky about something else. 

In the other room, the shower turns off with a pitiful wheeze from the pipes. God, he’s got to get a better flat. 

“There’s a toothbrush still in the packaging the third drawer down,” he calls. 

Muffled: “Thanks!” Then: “How long have you been planning this for?” 

“I haven’t been!” he replies, affronted. “I’m just, as mentioned, a gentleman. Also, you never know when you’ll need a toothbrush for yourself, and personally I’d rather just have it than needing to run to the shop at midnight.” No snappy comeback, which he’ll take as a victory.

He turns the heat down low on the stove in the hopes of keeping it more or less warm, finishes the tea’s steeping, and adds the milk and sugar. After a few minutes, he hears the bathroom door creak open, and soon enough Sasha’s back in the kitchen, still wearing his shirt, this time with damp hair in a tight high ponytail. 

Tim raises an eyebrow, and she rolls her eyes. “‘M putting off getting back into my old clothes.” 

He puts up his hands in surrender. “Whatever you say, Sasha, but if you were overcome by the sheer power of my sensual, masculine scent on my shirt, there's no shame—” 

“Shut up about your masculine scent and give me my omelet,” she commands (blushing nonetheless; another win for Team Stoker), and he laughs and complies, pulling a slightly chipped but still serviceable plate from the cabinet over the stove and sliding the omelet off the pan onto it. As she wanders over to the kitchen island and sits in one of his too-hard stools, Tim paws through the fridge and thankfully manages to unearth some yogurt. He also finds a slightly stale bagel in his pantry, and he’s still got that cream cheese, which, again: he’s taking all this as a victory. God, he’s a stellar adult. 

She eyes his significantly more pathetic breakfast as she tucks into her own but doesn’t comment on the discrepancy, which is kind of her. “This is actually really good, Tim.” 

“Such a tone of surprise,” he complains, sliding into the seat beside her, and she shakes her head and smiles. “I can be competent too, you know!” 

“I’ll believe it when I see it.” 

He heaves a great sigh. “Ever the skeptic. I hate you intellectual types.” 

Sasha laughs. “Yeah, alright, Mr. First-In-Anthropology-At-Trinity-College.” 

“I never said it wasn’t extended to myself!” 

She chuckles, and they spend the rest of breakfast in amicable silence, arms brushing a little on the countertop. Tim finishes first and ends up just sitting there, looking at her and trying his level best not to be weird about the reality of watching her eat. She looks back once she’s done sipping her tea and they just hold each other’s gaze for a moment. It’s quiet, the ambient sounds of the city just on the edge of Tim’s perception, the noises of the inhabitants of the flats above them coming to life, the gentle in-out of their own breaths. Usually that absence of loudness and activity grates on him, but now it almost seems like too much purely because of how very important _this_ is, Sasha’s fingers by his wrist on the granite counter; Sasha wearing his shirt, drinking his tea. Sasha in his bed this morning and on his couch last night, Sasha tucked next to him in countless different booths in countless different pubs, Sasha in the archives, Sasha cracking jokes that mostly go over his head from across the breakroom. Sasha, a long time coming and worth every second spent waiting. Sasha, somehow in his life, smiling and teasing and _good,_ and he loves her so overwhelmingly in this moment it aches somewhere deep in his chest in a place he didn’t even think existed. 

“So, work,” she says, voice barely above a whisper. 

“Yeah,” he murmurs. “Work.” 

“I’m going to have to leave soon if I’m going to be five minutes early like usual,” she says hesitantly. 

He starts to smile, the normalcy such a relief he could almost weep. “And I’d better get ready if I want to be fashionably late.” 

She scoffs. “It was never fashionable, Tim.” 

“Well, that’s your opinion, but the time difference will serve us well this time,” he points out haughtily, and she huffs but doesn’t refute him. There’s another pause, not quite so tense, but there’s still a question there. 

Slowly, Sasha stretches her hand forward to cover his. “It’s okay,” she tells him. Another pause. “Your place again tonight?” 

The smile comes in full force; he can’t help how it spreads across his face, wide and bright and genuine. “Yeah, of course, I—” 

“Good,” she cuts him off, smiling too. “I can’t do right after work, I have to go back to mine and get some stuff to stay the night; I am _not_ wearing the same clothes three days running.” 

“Well, you could always use mine,” he offers innocently, and isn’t _that_ an image, Sasha in the archives in one of his button-ups, sleeves rolled up to the elbows—

She pushes at his bicep with an overloud bark of a laugh that only endears her to him more. “Let’s table your fantasies for the moment, Tim, we have _logistics_ to worry about.” 

“Okay, I’m not hearing a _no—”_

Sasha might blush, but he can’t be sure because she’s surging forward to kiss him again before he can fully process whatever else her face might be doing. This one's significantly less chaste than the ones from earlier, all tongue and hands and fond _shut-the-fuck-up-Tim-Stoker,_ which is incidentally his favorite kind of kiss. When she finally breaks the kiss to scrape her teeth over his ear and then delicately press her lips against the side of his jaw, she doesn’t go far, lingering with her face nestled right up by his neck. Her fingers trail lightly up and down over the lines of his throat, that fragile network of tendon and vein. 

“Wish I could just stay here,” she breathes. 

“You can,” he offers, and he means it. "We can."

She shakes her head and strands of her wet hair brush up against his cheek. “No, I can’t. And you can’t either. Work.” Not that work is that great, what with the worm siege, but. Practical as ever, his Sasha. 

“Well. Tonight,” Tim says. 

Sasha leans back to look at him, eyes gleaming. “Tonight,” she agrees, before stepping back and sighing. “I’d better go get changed.” 

“And I’d better shower.” 

They hover there by the counter for another moment before Tim sighs and drops a kiss into her hairline. 

Sasha stays just a second longer before taking another regretful step away toward the bedroom, still not turning her back. “See you at work.” 

“See you,” Tim says, and heads reluctantly to the bathroom. He’ll bring her lunch today, he decides in the shower as he scrubs at his hair. Coffee too. If it makes him late, Jon’ll just have to deal with it. He’s on a _mission._ He finds himself humming something tuneless under his breath, smiling ridiculously. Through the steamed-up glass, he sees the second toothbrush, bright green and perfectly innocuous, dropped into the same mason jar as his, and he smiles wider.   
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> and then they went to work and nothing happened that whole day, and they went back to tim's apartment and had a good time! there were no worms and no spooky table. soon tim talks openly about his trauma and things don't automatically become perfect but sasha helps him thru and is there for him in general. tma is a romance. 
> 
> thanks so much for reading!! the title's from "the other side of paradise" by the glass animals ("i settle for a ghost i never knew / superparadise i held onto" you know how it is). you can find me on tumblr [@boneroutes](https://boneroutes.tumblr.com) where i used to be a general blog but am now very much all tma all the time. please leave a comment/kudos if you enjoyed, and thanks again for reading this <3


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